Camp Randall: America’s Colosseum and the World’s Guilty Pleasure

Camp Randall: Where America’s Colosseum Meets the World’s Schadenfreude
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Nursing a Warm Beer and Global Resentment

MADISON, WISCONSIN – On any given autumn Saturday, 80,000 cheese-brained pilgrims storm a red-brick fortress on the edge of a glacial lake, howling a war chant that sounds suspiciously like a Bavarian beer-hall chorus being strangled by a tractor. They call it Camp Randall Stadium, a name that conjures either a Civil War hospital or the world’s most aggressive summer-camp talent show. To the locals it is sacred turf; to the rest of the planet it is live-streamed proof that the American experiment has simply moved the gladiator games north and swapped lions for large men in tight pants.

From a satellite’s bored perspective, the scene is indistinguishable: every nation has its choreographed frenzy—Manchester’s Theatre of Dreams, Kolkata’s Salt Lake, Buenos Aires’s Bombonera—yet Camp Randall supplies a distinctly Midwestern twist: ritualized binge-drinking in sub-zero wind chill, accompanied by dairy-based headgear. The Romans demanded bread; Wisconsinites demand brats. Progress, like cholesterol, accumulates.

Still, the stadium’s gravitational pull is no provincial oddity. When the crowd belts “Jump Around” between the third and fourth quarters, the seismic tremor registers on university sensors 2.5 kilometres away—an achievement the geology department dutifully tweets in six languages, because nothing says “cutting-edge science” like documenting self-induced earthquakes triggered by white people in reversible jackets. The footage ricochets across Asian TikTok feeds where teenagers use it as ASMR to lull themselves into existential stupor: listen to the imperial core literally shaking itself for sport.

Internationally, Camp Randall functions as a Rorschach test. Europeans see taxpayer-subsidised obesity; Gulf monarchs see a recruitment fair for future defensive linemen they can naturalise for the 2031 World Cup; Chinese streaming platforms see another data point proving that America’s real opium is college sports, not fentanyl. Everyone leaves convinced their civilisation is slightly less doomed, a delusion as comforting as it is short-lived.

The numbers help. UW-Madison’s athletic department cleared US $106 million last year, a haul that would bankroll the Maldivian government for three. Nike outfits the Badgers in custom anthracite jerseys stitched somewhere near Ho Chi Minh City; the merchandise ships back across the same Pacific the Pentagon patrols for free. Call it the triangle trade of late capitalism: Vietnamese labour, American spectacle, global bewilderment.

Meanwhile, the athletes—technically “student-athletes,” a term as accurate as “civilian drone”—generate surplus value faster than a Frankfurt banker on amphetamines. Their compensation remains a scholarship, room, board, and the distant promise of a communications degree that even the communications professors have stopped believing in. If Marx were alive, he’d have a second heart attack watching the slow-motion replay.

Yet the ritual endures because it solves a universal problem: how to feel tribal without actually declaring war. The stadium becomes a pressure-release valve for a superpower that hasn’t won a convincing war since 1945 but still craves collective effervescence. Better to invade Iowa on a digital scoreboard than Iran in reality—though the linguistic similarity confuses more than one freshman.

Climate change, of course, is the uninvited tailgater. Each Saturday, 45 tons of garbage bloom across the parking lots like a post-consumer snowstorm. By 2050, when Madison’s January averages a balmy 3 °C, the famed “Frozen Tundra” will be merely damp, the beer slushies unnecessary. Future historians—if accreditation still exists—will interpret our fossils: layers of aluminum, cholesterol, and unresolved trauma compressed into a stratum labeled “Peak Denial.”

So the world watches, half-horrified, half-envious. We Europeans gave America democracy; they repackaged it into a marching band and a corporate jingle. You can almost hear the planet shrug: Let them jump. Gravity, like debt, is global.